This is one of those fascinating stories that everyone can enjoy, and therefore ought to learn. To quote the Description:
With a bounty on his head, the Red Army wants him dead, Soviet enemy number one. Second part of the Lauri Törni trilogy. The Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union was over, but the world was further tumbling down into war. Finland saw itself trapped between two power blocks. A new arrangement with Nazi Germany gave men like Lauri Törni an opportunity to train with the newly established Waffen-SS. But it was an opportunity with lasting consequences.
Israel's leading voice in science fiction, Yakon Merkin, has revealed the cover to the first novel in his upcoming Isekai series Light Unto Another World.
You can read more about it at Yakov's blog here, and you can find his existing books at Amazon here.
FanTube, I'm talking to YOU. Doomcock, Nerdrotic, Geeks & Gamers, Midnight's Edge, That Star Wars Girl, Heelsvsbabyface- all of you. Listen up.
Your conception of the SJW problem is wrong. You are consistently baffled at how the Woke Brigade go from failure to failure and only fail upward. This reason is because you made the same mistake that others have made for over 30 years in various hobby niches, as explained by author Brian Niemeier below:
The truth is that a cabal of fanatics has been working day and night to infiltrate the entertainment industry and pervert it into a propaganda machine. They've been at it for decades, and now nearly all major studios and publishers bow the knee to the Cult's high priests.
You'd be forgiven for mistaking these screencapped tweets from a self-described game creator for the scribblings on a lunatic asylum inmate's walls. The inability to discern reality from fantasy used to be a symptom of psychosis. Now it gets you a cushy sinecure pretending to make art while gibbering on Twitter.
You couldn't ask for a better example of Death Cult doctrine in practice. The Cult's central tenet is that any limit on personal expression, even reality, is oppressive and must be destroyed. A lot of people assume it's hyperbole to say that the Cult wants to destroy reality, which is odd because the Cultists' own public professions constantly refute that assumption.
That's why claims of the entertainment industry pushing anti-normal person agitprop for profit ring false. The Cultists in charge of our entertainment are laboring under a form of self-induced schizophrenia. They really believe that casting cape flicks with disabled lesbian Eskimo Wiccans will usher in an earthly paradise free of straight, white, Christian men.
Go ahead, read that again after you listen to Doomcock rant about how Doctor Who's recent season was nothing less than wholesale cultural despoiling and defilement.
You made a wholesale category error and it's come back to bite you good and hard in the ass, FanTube.
The Death Cult is not an aberration in an otherwise functional business. It's a Satanic anti-religion that's gained power across ALL institutions--public and private--in the West, and it's very reason for being is to defile and destroy all that gives live meaning and purpose. They revel in taking power over your shows, your comics, your toys, your games and ruining them so thoroughly that you quit them in disgust. They use their power in media and tech to control what you see and hear, following a playbook refined by their predecessors.
This is why Narrative Warfare is a thing. The SJWs are obsessed with controlling information, and that control not only includes what you receive, but also what you produce, and to do that requires controlling both the flow of information as well as what flows through them. You cannot act on thoughts that you do not have.
Yes, they do use 1984 as an instruction manual. They also use Rules For Radicals, so read that also. The combination results in things like this recent #orcposting flareup; it's a Humiliation Ritual, where they know what they say is bullshit, but by making you go along with it--in any fashion, however slight--they know that they're flexing on you, demonstrating their power, and thereby setting the frame by which all discourse is enacted.
And that's what propaganda controls: The Frame Game.
You buy into their framing of the issue when you accept their terms, however implicit, via attempting logical argumentation- be it Dialetic or Rhetorical. They don't care; they can and will be total bad-faith shitters in order to maintain control over the frame, constantly making you adjust to their shifting of goalposts, knowing that onlookers are inclined to see this as them flexing on you and therefore being in power over you. The result? They win the fight that matters, and you're wondering yet again why Culty Kathy hasn't been guillotined yet.
Until you accept the truth about the problem, you cannot resist it; you can only mire yourself further.
This is why you don't engage SJWs in argument. You shitpost at them, relentlessly and mercileessly. It's about the Frame Game, and only if you control the frame do you have any chance at beating them.
And if you want to start getting a handle on the matter in more detail, buy Brian's new book at Amazon; ebook and paperback is available. For more reading on SJWs, see the Comments.
The Excellence of Elocution has a new rant all about the death of the Big Two, and with it the American comics industry. Have yourself a listen.
That the Japanese market is thriving is no surprise, but I share Razorfist's take that American comic readers are sleeping on the European scene- and we ought to be fixing that. For those dissatisfied with American offerings, and disliking the Eastern aesthetic, reading B-D comics out of France and Belgium should be a viable alternative- especially when English versions are available on Amazon.
FanTube's Outrage Of The Day is about the Devil Mouse allowing Culty Kathy to make more wokeshit out of the corpse of George Lucas's creation.
I don't care.
What does bother me is this delusional insistence that any not-SJW output from SJW-converged corporations is to be taken as a reason to re-engage with the brand, and then get mad again when the usual converged crap continues instead of the course-correction that they expect. The Pop Cult cannot be disabused of this false perception; they want to see that market forces will compel the corporations to purge the SJWs once it becomes clear that adhering to the Death Cult causes the collapse of corporate operation and continued growth.
In short, they don't get that the problem is religious, that this is a Black Crusade, and as such "facts" and "logic" mean nothing to the Death Cult. It doesn't matter of the merch sales collapse. It doesn't matter if the stock price collapses. It doesn't matter if the box office revenue goes down like the Hindenburg, or the theme parks such harder than a black hole. They're going to destroy it all deliberately, and then they'll use their network of fellow travelers to move on to another target and do it all again until there is nothing left but their cult- and therefore no escape from their evil.
Which is why it is not enough to shun then and be vigilant against infiltration by them. They need to be sought out and destroyed. Let them know the flame.
Defense is necessary, but not sufficient. Offense is required, and as Nassim Talib points out the most intolerant party always wins these conflicts. Be most intolerant. Be the flame. Bring the flame. Burn them out. Burn them to ash.
The leading Hispanic voice in Science Fiction and friend of the Retreat, Jon del Arroz, has a new release out on Amazon and if you dig Space Opera you want to get a copy.
And if you want more than a picture, here's the blurb:
Humanity is at war...
...many citizens want no part of it.
Governor Antony Lemkin has done the unthinkable as a politician--voluntarily stepping down from his post in protest of Earth's escalating war with the Aryshans.
With war drums beating and the machinery of government going full force, there's little he can do to but voice his dissent, until mega-industrialist Fabio DePino presents him with a plan: build a new Earth, far away from humanity's conflicts.
But will Earth's government simply let colonists leave their control?
Fans of Babylon 5 and Robert Heinlein's classic The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress will love this new space colonization adventure by #1 Bestselling author Jon Del Arroz!
Jon's a solid writer that delivers the goods, and he's built himself up to a point where you won't be waiting long for more of this new series. If this is your jam, click on that image above and buy yourself a Kindle copy now. If you prefer print, you'll get that option soon enough.
My editor, and Friend of the Retreat, Brian Niemeier has released a new non-fiction book that builds on posts made on his blog for years about the Death Cult and why people have got to stop funding their own destruction by giving it money.
Everybody thinks Hollywood is political. Everybody’s wrong.
You know that the big movie studios, comic book companies, and video game publishers push an agenda. What you don’t know is that the corporations in control of your entertainment aren’t grifters or ideologues. They’re evangelists of a fanatical anti-religion.
Movie producers don’t ruin beloved film franchises for profit. Comic book writers don’t warp iconic superheroes into self-parodies to sway voters. They hate their audiences with zealous fervor. They want you demoralized, they want your kids propagandized, and they want you to pay for the privilege.
Nostalgia-fueled habit keeps many of these cultists’ victims coming back for more abuse. But you can escape the cycle. In this book you’ll see how the corrupt entertainment industry hooks its customers, and you’ll gain the tools to reclaim your dignity from the Pop Cult.
Learn to stop paying people who hate you, take back your life, and have fun while you’re at it!
Yes, this is the book FanTube says they want, but they don't. They're the ones who keep coming back for more abuse and pay for the privilege, instead of walking away and giving their money to alternatives that don't hate them. That alone is a winning reason to buy a copy. Do yourself a favor and get yourself a copy today.
Friend of the Retreat Kit Sun Cheah has a new Indiegogo campaign up and running, and close to its modest goal. Check it out.
This is a bold project, but I'm certain the man can hit it. He's one of the fastest in the #PulpRev scene, so while the below is a boast as well as a mission statement, I know he's good for it.
"SINGULARITY SUNRISE is my most ambitious series yet. Consisting of five novels, every book will be published every sixty days beginning in July. All five books are complete. There is no risk that the project will fail. If you want a taste of what to expect from the series, sign up for my newsletter here and receive the exclusive FREE prequel short story!"
You can find the campaign page here, and a quick look at the Perks make it clear he's giving great value for your pledge. If he's offering what you like, back this campaign.
Following my post on Hollywood teaching you to write for the machine and not to write well as such, a video on writing actual prose- and one for we who write tales of action and adventure.
This is the sort of thing you'll hear others like Brian Niemeier talk about from time to time, so if you read his posts on this then much of this video will be familiar. As a lot of us do write some form of adventure fiction, fight scenes and battle scenes are commonplace and therefore this is relevant to our interests to hear another's take on it with a specific focus on what prose offers that comics, film, and television do not.
Now to find more like Hello Future Me out there. Like it or not, people do lean a lot on podcasts and videos for learning these days. Go where the audience is.
Practical psychology on a common SJW brainjacking technique used to pull off the zombie-bite and start turning normies into cultists because it IS cult psychology.
The more you compare SJW Rhetorical technique to cult indoctrination and psychological absue, the clearer it becomes that SJWs are cultists and SJW ideology is a cult.
And of course it's not new. The specific words used change, but you will find the general principle illustrated in the myths and literature of the world's nations, and you will also see examples of how the honest good-faith actor actually achieves useful results. It's the difference between the wise mentor and the evil cult leader.
A while back, Brian Niemeier observed that most writers are so influenced by film and television that their written prose reads like a transliterated movie. It turns out that this is not entirely incidental or accidental. When you go looking for videos on writing, writing for the screen is far and away the most dominant subset that comes up; writing for OldPub comes second.
Channels such as Film Courage, Behind The Curtain, Tyler Mowery, The Closer Look all focus their writing content on film and television. Specifically, they focus on writing for the Hollywood machine. These channels are the A/V counterpart of OldPub channels like iWriterly; they talk with total myopia on their specific subset of the larger media within which they exist, completely ignoring (save for a few darlings) that other centers of the business even exist, and all of their talk about writing is tainted accordingly.
In short, the same institutional incompetent we see in OldPub is reflected in Hollywood, and because the structure of the institutions are nigh-identical--talent needs agent to shop manuscript around to sell for meager returns and little respect outside of a handful of whales and a few more well-connected insiders--so therefore is the origin of the rot and the progress of its spread. Only the greater size has made it seem otherwise until the last few years.
This also means that Hollywood--as with OldPub and Big Two comics--are going to be disrupted good and hard by the same means we've seen appear to the aforementioned. NewPub has disrupted OldPub significantly now; the paper supply shock is threatening to shutter at least another publisher as well as the last remaining big corporate bookstore chain. If you think the big studios aren't scrambling to find a way to make streaming their bitch, you aren't paying attention; Corona-chan threatens to kill movie theater chains permanently, so that real estate business is as big a weakness as OldPub's paper-pushing problem. Disrupt a pillar, and you can bring down a giant.
And with that comes the exposure of so many "good practices" revealing themselves to be utter horseshit, as the OldPub crowd clinging to WorldCon and the Hugos with white-knuckled terror have to confront now that they've noticed #20Booksto50K and boy are those whores so mad that #20Books eats their lunch all day every day and twice on Sundays. I fully expect a lot of those oh-so-important Hollywood folks to be suffering internal Blue Screens of Death when it hits them that their Best Practices are such hot garbage out in the global marketplace.
Why? For the same reason OldPub can't comprehend why The Shadow is still a compelling character: their dogma rejects the idea such a character could even exist.
This a dogma in Hollywood. Your protagonist has to have a fundamental character flaw, and overcoming that flaw is the price your protagonist has to pay to get what he wants; the world has to change the character to make this happen. If you don't have this, your script gets rejected every single time, and the system of Hollywood won't put money into making it into a movie.
This is a dogma that is defeated with just one comeback: "Explain Dr. No."
The dogma is yet another mutation on Joseph Campbell's Hero Journey concept, formalized into a writing formula by George Lucas and then made Mad-Libs level retarded by books like Save The Cat. It's imposed by Boomers and enforced by their meme-clones, just like you see in OldPub with its own dogmas.
I'll quote Robin Laws' article on Iconic Heroes to explain what Hollywood cannot comprehend:
While a dramatic hero follows a character arc in which he is changed by his experience of the world (examples: Orpheus, King Lear, Ben Braddock), an iconic hero undertakes tasks (often serially) and changes the world, restoring order to it, by remaining true to his essential self.
Prevailing creative writing wisdom favors the changeable dramatic character over his serially unchanging iconic counterpart, but examples of the latter remain enduring tentpoles of popular culture. It’s the clear, simple, elemental iconic heroes who keep getting reinvented every generation. Each such classic character spoke to the era of its invention, while also evoking an eternal quality granting it a continuing resonance. We are going to create a new set of heroes who speak to the contemporary world while evoking the inescapable power of the iconic model.
An iconic hero re-imposes order on the world by reasserting his essential selfhood. The nature of his radical individuality can be summed up with a statement of his iconic ethos. It is the ethos that grants higher meaning to the hero’s actions, and a clue to his creator’s intentions. An iconic hero’s ethos motivates and empowers him.
The Shadow is the strongest example of an Iconic Hero in American media, and it is because that character is iconic that he is hated by Hollywood and fellow travelers in OldPub and Big Two.
Why? Because the Icon is truth personified, and we all know how well those who run the media institutions hate the truth because they hate the Truth.
Now you see why Hollywood teaches writing wrong. It's not an accident. It's deliberate, and because it's been too dominate for too long it developed myopia; this inability to see that alternatives exist, alternatives that embrace the Iconic and thrive accordingly, are what will end up killing it once co-morbidity loads exceed its ability to bear them (as is already the case with OldPub and the Big Two).
I'm going ahead with the Indiegogo campaign to get Books Two and Three finished and out there. Folks are getting their TrumpBux, etc. and Trump is--as I post this--detailing his reopening plan for the American economy. In short, there is no reason to delay further. I'll sort the details and get something more informative out in a few days.
Friend of the Retreat, the leading Hispanic voice in Science Fiction, and the hardest-working man in indie comics--Jon del Arozz--has a new comic crowdfund going.
If it's half as funny as this trailer makes it look, then it'll be worth backing. You can find the campaign here, with the floor being $10 for a print copy.
As for the campaign for my own Star Knight series, I'm going to post on that tomorrow.
The public (but closed) Alpha test for the next World of Warcraft expansion, Shadowlands, is now live and folks are cutting videos.
Way too early to tell if this is another apology, but that's not the point. This is about Gamer Psychology.
There is a major difference between the audience for media of passive observation and media of active participation. That difference is that the source of satisfaction stems from the interaction between the player and the playspace provided by manipulating the levers of the machine that are game mechanics and gameplay procedures. Each type of game and genre of setting therein has specific expectations put upon it; successful game design fulfills those expectations and failures do not.
The data on what those expectations are is not hard to find anymore. Some types of games (e.g. MMORPGs) are drowning in it while others are harder to acquire, but nonetheless the revealed preference of gamers in every corner of the gaming business is knowable to designers and publishers; that said parties continue to push crap they don't want says a lot more about them than the ill-served gamers.
And yes, as with learning how to write satisfying fiction, this is entirely teachable. You can--and people do--study this stuff and try to tease out useful psychological insights for use in making future games that don't tank in the marketplace. (Why this is something that only the casino crowd seem to bother with is beyond me.) If nothing else, you can just find yourself an old but popular game (e.g. AD&D 1st edition), play it exactly as-written and pay close attention to what the experience of executing procedures and using mechanics actually is and not what you want it to be. Do that with several others of that sort; take notes and think deep on how the game achieves its results when operated as instructed.
Gamers are about the experience of being the guy in that situation calling the shot to get things done. This is universal across all game types, from the Napoleonics big with the Boomers standing around sandtables to the kids throwing around words that get you banned on Twitch playing whatever it is that's in the Fortnite slot this week, with only the sort of shot-calling being done and how being the variables. Stuff like Civilization is shot-calling at a bigger scope and scale but a slower pace of decision than, say, Street Fighter (small scope and scale, fast pace of decision).
The best and enduring examples get that this is about shot-calling. Find that point and build your design around it. Find the games that nail this and publish them.
For my writers, today's #20Books video. This is all about the first chapter and getting a reader hooked.
The reason for why there is so much focus put upon that first chapter, that first page, that first paragraph--that hook--is because there is so much competition for audience now that you can't slack on that anymore. You slip, and they're out; the data out of Kindle Unlimited makes this crystal clear. That data put the lie to what you're told in MFA programs around the world as to what is good writing; you need to get the hook into the reader immediately or they're out and your book fails.
The psychology here is about attention, and attention is held when the author correctly identifies what matters to the audience and focuses upon that while pushing away the rest. This can be taught. There are metric fuckloads of videos and podcasts about doing this in various niches (screenwriting has a lot on YouTube), in addition to the forest of wood pulp that are books and articles about it. Avail yourself of them.
He Is Risen! Happy Easter (for all you Western folks) and I hope you're having a good day. I won't be doing any ranting today, but instead putting something before you that you may find fun. This is the sequel of Mashin Hero Wataru, from the Bandai Spirits channel on YouTube. (Hit the CC button turn on the subtitles.)
And the original series if you haven't seen it.
I expect Bandai Spirits to upload more episodes to the playlist as their air in Japan, seeing as they're using this to get around international rights distribution issues (i.e. screwing Crunchyroll and Funimation). If only they would just follow the lead the Super Robot Wars team took and just released English-language releases via Singapore instead of relying on SJW-converged companies here, or had the balls to be like Studio Ghibli and put in contract clauses preventing it.
And yes, as you might expect, this is a kid-friendly series.
A round up of things my writer friends may find of interest:
Jon del Arroz cut a video about the Science Fiction Writers of America, and why it's a useless and feckless SJW cult front for OldPub SJWs. Jon points out that #20BooksTo50K is the superior alternative in every way, which leads me to-
The #20BooksTo50K channel has kept up the video output all week. Today's video is a Q&A with the channel/group head. Even if you don't find a specific video or Facebook thread useful, the resources archived in the group and channel (as well as their conferences) are fantastic for writers who want to actually pay bills with their writing instead of doing Death Cult ritual bullshit.
Here is the link to the Independent Alliance of Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors, the guild founded by the #20BooksTo50K as an alternative to SWFA. I'll sign up soon and see if Craig's going to deliver.
The fact remains that the organization long purporting to be a Writer's Guild for SF authors is instead a Death Cult gatekeeper that works with publishers and agents in OldPub to screen out Wrongthinkers and monopolize the business to their interests. They do this in association with Fellow Travelers in comics, film, and television; this explains the ability for fuckups to fail upward and vetted members to shift media.
This entire structure is now collapsing under the weight of its own obsolescence and co-morbidity of incompetence. "Fork and Replace" was what I said would happen, and now it's happening.
In the City of God there is a chamber. There are no known doors to it. There are no known windows looking into it. All that is known is that there is a table with twelve seats and before that table is a throne. Around the room are twelve statues. Three of them are of the Archangels. Nine are of great warrior-martyrs of ages past. This is the Chamber of the Star Knights of the Vatican Solar Guard, and here they meet when it is required of them.
The idea was one part Round Table, one part Hall of Justice, one part Traditional Super Robot HQ, and one part Gray Lensman Club HQ. I imagined its use as a council chamber to be something like the mission briefing seen in Thunderball (and its SPECTRE counterpart isn't too shabby either). This concept is in the books now, but it's not given much attention because so far there is no need to do so.
Bonus!
Good Friday being what it is, it's time for a trip into the underworld, and here's your portal.
And that will be a good thing to keep in mind when Brian Niemeier releases Don't Give Money To People Who Hate You later this year.
In case you missed it, veteran Science Fiction author (and the man who single-handedly made the Star Wars Expanded Universe into what it was) Timothy Zahn launched out of the dying OldPub edifice and went wholly independent with his new release- a novella, GHOST RIDERS IN THE SKY.
(Clink on the image to buy the book.)
The leading Hispanic voice in Science Fiction, and the great revivalist in comics, Jon del Arroz had this to say.
Friend of the Retreat (and my editor) Brian Niemeier concurred:
"Newpub authors have been predicting high-profile defections from oldpub for years. The battered spouse mentality engendered by the Big Five publishers kept their exploited talent on the reservation longer than expected, but now their business model's collapse has finally prompted an A+ list author to jump the fence.
You can be sure that Zahn won't be the last."
This on the heels of the announcement that Corona-chan so screwed up the paper production pipeline that OldPub relies upon that their entire business prospects for the year are looking dodgy and as such the collapse of the Big Five into Four or less is all but guaranteed to accelerate at this point.
I'll have to check the accounts, but at $3 this novella is a steal; down here is where ebook pricing should be and not at OldPub's stupid insistence on being comparable to a hardcover copy. And once you're done with that, I've got my own stuff still available to read; more coming soon.
The Business of Writing and #20BooksTo50K continue to put out good content for you folks (like me) in lockdown.
The videos TBoW did on the SBA process are going to be more valuable to you operating formal businesses, but just about any of you involved with writing and publishing should get good value out of the #20Books videos. You're likely to get more out of that than whatever passes for entertainment on mainstream TV.
That screeching sound is OldPub losing its mind over their paper pulp business burning up like a California wildfire.
(Click on the image to make readable)
Friend of the Retreat, and my editor, Brian Niemeier also has a post on this development today. He's been talking about OldPub really being in the paper business for quite a while now, and it is obvious that the aforementioned Facebook post is a confession that this is in fact true.
In a related corollary, the audiobook business just crashed; this exposed what many suspected about that market- it's base is people commuting to their bullshit makework fake jobs, which goes alongside a major percentage of users of streaming video and audio services, and OldPub has been as stupid about audio as they have about digital so this news just threw gasoline on the fire.
Daddy Warpig gets into the issue in this Twitter thread here.
Not just comics. TradPub is getting it right in the neck. Full post by a Tor editor below, but TL;DR is "we depend on paper from China to print our books, we be screwed".
But, like comics, this is actually their fault, not the Wuhan Fluhan Death Hack. /2https://t.co/WncMMmQWW2
And he's right. OldPub could have--should have--gone ahead of the curve on publishing technologies and business models years ago but stubbornly thought they could squash them instead and keep everyone on their paper pulp plantation perpetually, using that captive audience to then serve the Death Cult (as they have been) and ensure their own power just as perpetually.
Now it's come undone. Not "coming", "come"; there's no returning from this. All that remains is for the metal fatigue to hit the breaking point and collapse in a cascade that ends in the industry falling into an ashen heap. It couldn't have happened to a more deserving bunch of bastards, and I won't miss any of them once they're gone. It's not like the actually valuable material they published won't find new ways to get published--even in print--once Corona-chan's come and gone.
Meanwhile, I get now how Alucard feels.
Because this is some apocalyptic shit going down, and man a lot of people are finally getting what's coming for them.
Tonight the Metro City Boys has a guest, Voice Actor Sean Chiplock. Between all of the usual goof going on, there's Real Talk about the business to be had. Get comfy and hit that play button.
Whatever you do, be careful not to drink anything hot while they're being goofy. Coffee coming out of your nose hurts.
Both of the writing-related channels I follow--Business of Writing and #20BooksTo50K--have had regular video releases over the week or so that you want to check out. The former, especially in the last few days, have been about current events and getting help from the Small Business Administration (if in the U.S.); you owe it to yourself to go there and watch his stuff. The latter's been a series of interviews with other authors on different business aspects regarding the indie writing world, and you really should queue those up and give them a listen; you're going to find these useful.
Oh, and a bonus, and a reminder of just what one man with the right tools can do now, Part 5 of Astartes dropped finishing this story arc. Better than anything officially done.
Months after leading an SJW against the OSR in general and me in particular for "Toxic Masculinity", Adam Koebel (Storygamer, Male Feminist, and creator of Dungeonworld) did a bad bad thing, proving yet again what kind of masculinity is REALLY toxic.
Koebel is a Dangerhair SJW Death Cultist. That he'd demonstrate by his behavior that he's projecting hard enough to be a viable launch vehicle for NASA should surprise no one, and I fully expect some ritual displays of contrition that are as fake as he is before this is all swept under the rug and everyone pretends that it never happened whether they want to or not. Why? He's a Somebody in the Tabletop RPG cell of the Death Cult Network, and Somebodies get their indiscretions papered over until the power dynamic shifts and they're pushed down the ladder or expelled from the Party. (e.g. Weinstein) Granted, not much of a Somebody, but still Somebody.
Once again, quoting one of the video comments: "Physiognomy turns out to be real yet again, Koebel was always sickening to look upon, I had a weird feeling about that guy from the first time I saw him."
Friend of the Retreat Brian Niemeier has a post today about SJW infiltration into anime production, taking the approach we all suspected: getting on the production committees. Head over there and read that before continuing.
I'm not mad about this as such. They'd already been executing a containment strategy, but actual pozzing was always the goal and this is the means to do it. The problem I see is that it may be too little and too late, for them and us, as forces beyond anyone's control have made this development moot.
No, not just Corona-chan, though that will play a role. No, not just the ChiComs, though they are exerting pressure. The problem is what's coming out.
Since the high-water mark of the late 90s--there's that marker again--the entire field crashed creatively and technically. 2000-2010 was a decade more or less lost to both the changeover to CGI-dominated production, with its own learning curves and growing pains as well as talent turnover. The genres that made anime popular worldwide fell into disuse overnight, with so few good original works coming out that when one finally hit like the old days (Gurren Lagann) it was treated like the Second Coming. The majority of the embarassing output that marks typical production today began here, but there's another trend to address.
Like Western pop culture, Japanese pop culture stagnated. More and more reliance on fewer and fewer franchises. More and more remakes, retreads, side-stories, and nostalgia works--more plays into the Nostalgia Trap--and fewer original works outside of a couple of commercially viable genres. More of the works that do get made focus more and more on childhood and high school life and not on adult life or feature adult protagonists; more works are contemporary in setting and not exhibiting imagination or speculation. The fanfic phenomenon afflicting the West is abundant in the East also, with all of the consequences to go with it.
In short, what we're now seeing here is that--as with the Western experience--the SJW push into anime is no different a chase of corpse-eating grubs finding more to eat than it was previously. The anime business is over-reliant on so few genres that you can count on one hand and have digits left over, and about as many remain present enough to retain an overall illusion of variety; the result is an increasingly freakish audience, and freakish r-selected audiences are breeding grounds for SJW pozzing.
As much as I enjoy the remakes and revisits of late--they are very well done--you can't rely on them forever. As much as the anime industry have finally recovered in technical competency from the CGI turnover 20 years ago, they remain creatively bankrupt and the practices are not conducive to making the healthy cultural works of the previous heyday; it's no surprise that few new works compare favorably to those of that past era anymore than Mouse Wars compares favorably to Uncle George's films.
In short, consider the possibility that this is necessary to fix a persistent problem, and it is unlikely that anything within the present context will solve it.
And if you get the idea that I'm fine with this, you haven't been paying attention. It may be necessary, but that doesn't mean I want the pain to happen. I just want there to be an anime industry clean of this poz once this is over.
Toshiro Mifune, one of the greatest actors that ever lived, was born on this day 100 years ago.
Yes, there is a documentary about the man, released in 2016.
I don't admire many entertainers, but two of them are Japanese and Mifune is one of them. Whatever his flaws, as an actor--and an icon of manliness--he was one of the best and he has few peers, only one of which is still alive. (That would be Clint Eastwood.) Such a figure deserves to be remembered and celebrated. While famous for his samurai films, his dramatic turns in more contemporary pieces are what drives home the fact of his mastery of the craft- often directed by the legendary Akira Kurosawa. You are not wasting your time by watching his films; hit up his filmography and start watching.
Then look forward to seeing him appear, in spirit, cast in the role of a Star Knight.
